"Eh, pa". Being sick sucks. My colon has had some extracurricular activities for the past few days. I think I've been more dangerous to the atmosphere than a pasture's worth of cows.
But it's all good. We get good medicine here, like cherry-flavored Pepto Bismol, Orange Gatorade and suggested foods include bananas and applesauce. Of course, you can't BUY applesauce, so making it, you can smell it the whole time and eat it still hot. Yum.
For the record, applesauce twice a day gets old.
Just saw "One Hour Photo" for the second time. Robin Williams is really an incredible actor.
I think quite often about what I want to do when I go back, and acting's definitely crossed my mind, but not professionally. I really would like to be involved in community theater, wherever I end up. It just seems so much more fulfilling.
I had a taste of that on Friday when I was working with the HIV/AIDS activist group. I was having them do role plays where a student who knows nothing about AIDS is asking one of these "activists" what it is. They got it, for the most part, and after giving a brief explanation taken pretty directly from definitions I've given and that they've heard from other sources, they moved on to talk about everything else they know about AIDS. But my intention was to probe their knowledge and see if they understood it well enough to explain it in simple terms.
Really, the whole exercise was very much like a character development exercise I've done and likewise led for others to do. In this character development exercise, you nitpick someone's character choices by asking them very specific questions about their character, so that they have to make up information. The idea is that if they can make up consistent information dealing with their character, then they know the character.
What I wanted this role play to be was essentially the same thing. So I chose one of the activists to be my model, and I pretended to be a student with no AIDS knowledge.
"How do you get AIDS?"
"If you have the HIV virus..."
"What's a virus?"
"Well, it's a cell, see..."
"What's a cell?"
"Well, um..."
I admit, it was mean and maybe a little TOO nitpicky, but eventually I got results...
"A cell is...well, all living things are made of cells. You can't see them."
"So you can't see HIV?"
"No."
"So what does it do?"
"It destroys your immune system."
"Your imm...what??"
"Your immune system. It's what fights diseases in your body."
"Oh, so your body can't fight diseases with HIV!"
"Right!"
I think this kid thought he didn't know anything, but he really knew quite a bit, just not how to explain it. And we all had a fun time, with me playing dumb - and of course, I hammed it up, as these sessions can get dry otherwise - it felt good to be acting on some level.
I just hope more of my students show up, because I only ended up with 6 kids on Friday.
Peace
John
